An Exprimental Study On The Application Of Constructivism To The English Reading Teaching In Senior Schools

"Students' reading ability should be paid more attention to in English teaching in senior high schools." This is stipulated in the English teaching syllabus of senior high schools. Chinese students learn to listen, speak, write, and translate through reading where English is a foreign language. Only through reading can Chinese students learn English without the limitation of time, setting and place. Books can provide students with all the learning environments. In a sense, if there is no reading, there will be no language learning. Students must read widely if they want to learn English well. At the same time, reading has been regarded by the public as the most important approach to acquiring information in foreign language learning for quite a long time. Therefore, the fostering of reading ability in English teaching has been greatly concerned by teachers and researchers on teaching strategies all along.During a long period, a problem exists in the both aspects of teaching and learning in ordinary senior high schools, which is greatly influenced by conventional education. On one hand, the reading teaching notion of most teachers is outmoded for the reading teaching idea lags behind and the reading teaching method is single. In a word, the situation is the fact that teaching loses contact with reality of society. On the other hand, the initiative and the main function of learning are not fully aroused, which is a type of learning without any activity. It is reflected as follows: firstly, teaching is planned uniformly so it is difficult to reflect students' differences. In the traditional reading teaching classroom, the teacher usually ignores students' individual difference with adopting the same tactic, regarding the students with different ability levels as the ones of the identical level. Consequently, students with high marks think the learning of courses too easy while other students with lower results cannot catch up. Teaching is difficult to reach the anticipated result naturally. Secondly, it is difficult for teachers to have equal dialogues with students. The way that the teachers take in English reading teaching in traditional senior high schools is the explanation of words and sentences one by one. So students accept knowledge passively and their minds are in the state of suppression, and entity is not given play to. Teachers are ruling the classrooms so it is very difficult to take equal dialogues with students. Thirdly, there are less mutual activities among students: it is not easy to learn from others strong points to offset one's weaknesses. With the traditional teaching method, there is no cooperation and communication among students, no true exchange and chances of initiative study. They are confined in the range of one's own limited knowledge and have lost the opportunity of development. Therefore, this thesis attempts to describe a new learning theory from a psychological and educational perspective. "Within the last few years, a distinctly different body of theory has begun to attract the attention of the field of instructional design and development--constructivism." (Knuth & Cunningham, 1993: 163). Constructivism holds the view that knowledge must be constructed within the cognitive structure of every individual; it is fundamentally personal, and independent on experience in the learning environment and on social interactions. It is a theory about knowledge and learning, having a radically different definition of what knowing is and how one comes to know. It dislikes behaviorism for its avoidance to refer to meaning, representation and thought, but it also stresses such concepts as emotions, experiences, and interactions. The theory "describes as knowledge as temporary, developmental, nonobjective, internally constructed and socially and culturally mediated. Learning from this perspective isviewed as a self-regulatory process of struggling with the conflict between existing personal models of the world and discrepant new insights, constructing new representations and models of reality as a human meaning-making venture with culturally developed tools and symbols, and further negotiating such meaning cooperative social activity, discourse and debate." (Fosnot 1996:â…¸).From a constructivist perspective, students learn through interaction with others. This collaboration has two basic aspects: the collaboration between students, and the collaboration between the teacher and the students. The following experiment proves the necessities of the collaboration between them and it is carried out in No. 4 Senior High School in Laiwu. Conducted from September to December 2006, in 1996, in this research, the author adopted constructivism instruction model, aiming to collaborate study in English reading instruction. In the experiment, two classes of the subjects each consisting of 50 students were chosen respectively as the control group and the experimental group for their same level of English proficiency. While in the experimental class, constructivism instruction model was adopted, in the control class traditional teaching methods were utilized as usual. Data collection involved objective means such as pre-test and post-test. Data analysis focused on 1) students' performance before and after the experiment, 2) differences in achievements in pre-test and post-test.The results of the research indicate that in this teaching framework, the students in the experimental class have improved their English reading abilities more explicitly and rapidly than those in the control class. Their reading strategies and awareness of constructivism and its activation also develop very quickly.All these demonstrate that constructivism is of great value in improving high school students' English reading comprehension. It can help students develop reading efficiency, and it can be mastered by high school teachers easily and quickly if the procedure of training is structured clearly. Thus the author concludes that it is both feasible and beneficial to apply constructivism into reading teaching in the English class in Chinese senior high schools.Finally, a short conclusion offers a generalization of this thesis, emphasizing the significance of constructivism theory applied to English reading in senior high schools, pointing out the limitations in the study and proposing several efficient suggestions on reading teaching based on constructivism theory, and indicating the necessity and importance of a further research in this aspect.